Been A Long Day
by Evenmoor
Summary: Lestrade wishes this day would just end.  Then again, things could definitely be worse.


**Disclaimer**: I do not own _Sherlock_ or Lestrade. I do enjoy a good laugh at his expense, though.

**A/N**: There's an awful lot of Lestrade-related angst out there, so here's something for those of us who want to see something a little more light-hearted for our long-suffering DI. There's no particular time-frame for this story, and no real spoilers for any of the _Sherlock_ stories.

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><p>Years later, Detective Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard would look back on this day and wonder how me managed to make it through without committing a homicide or having a stroke.<p>

The morning featured a prolonged wait to give testimony before the Crown Court. After sitting around for hours, he was told that he would not go before the Bench until tomorrow at the earliest. By the time he managed to escape from the clutches of the Crown Prosecutors, it was well past noon.

Deciding he might as well take advantage of the hour, he called his wife to invite her to dinner with him. There was little enough opportunity for him to share a meal in the middle of the day with her. But her call went straight to voicemail, and as soon as he made it back to the office, Donovan came in with an intimidatingly large pile of paperwork, all of which the chief superintendent wanted done yesterday. So Lestrade was forced to content himself with dim sum, which rarely sat well on his stomach.

Before he was even a third of the way through the mountain of "absolutely essential" documents, he was summoned out to a crime scene. Dimmock, who would have normally fielded the call-out, had had the audacity to come down with the flu and vomit quite messily in the middle of the office. Needless to say, this did nothing to help settle the dim sum for Lestrade.

At the crime scene, it was inevitable that Anderson was on forensics. While he was a decent enough crime scene technician, he had the downright annoying tendency to behave as if he were a character on that bloody American TV show, actually telling Lestrade what "must have happened" instead of simply gathering the evidence like he was supposed to. Plus, his face looked like a weasel. Maybe it was petty of the veteran detective inspector, but it was true. But Anderson was also cheating on his wife with Donovan, and not very circumspectly at that. So Lestrade had to deal with the awkward tension and veneer of professionalism the two put up towards each other, as well. It was getting on his nerves, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. (If she had been boffing a fellow detective, it would have been a different story altogether.)

Just as they were getting ready to clear off from the crime scene, Anderson decided to take a look under the bed. To his very great surprise (and Lestrade's profound annoyance) a man – totally unclothed – burst out of hiding, knocking Anderson down and taking off out the window and down the fire escape. Being a good copper, Lestrade was compelled to chase after the man instead of laughing his head off at Anderson. Oh, he loved to watch the weasel squirm.

All things considered, the man was not hard to follow, given his current state of (un)dress. The pursuit came to a sudden and ignominious end when the bloke got stuck in a fence, unable to move in either direction lest he do some extremely painful injury to his manhood. To make matters worse, it started to rain while they were waiting to cut the man free of his awkward position. (He seized the moment to give a scathing rebuke to the constable who was supposed to have cleared the bedroom. Lestrade didn't go too hard on the rookie; he just made sure that he _never_ forgot this incident.)

After the paramedics checked the man out (and the constables checked the man in), Lestrade was more than ready to go home, but he still needed to finish the paperwork for the DCS.

An eternity later, he filled out the final form and handed the entire ridiculous mountain back to Donovan and all but sprinted for the door before they could think up something else for him to handle. Unfortunately, the trip home was just as cursed as the rest of the day. No matter how often it rained, no one could figure out how to drive properly in it, so it took him far longer to get home than usual.

As he finally closed the door behind him and hung up his coat, he sighed deeply. All he wanted to do was to fall into bed and sleep for the next ten years.

Walking wearily into the bedroom, he wondered were his wife could be – she was always home before he was. Then he spotted the note on the pillow: "Gone to Tesco, will be back soon." He smiled, picking up the note, then realized it wasn't on the ordinary cheap paper. Absently, he turned it over, vacantly curious.

It took him a full thirty seconds for his exhausted brain to register what he was looking at. Then came the utterly inane thought, "_Why would she write a note on the back of an ultrasound?_"

Muffled giggles coming from the closet broke his concentration. As he stood there in utter confusion, his wife emerged, wielding a video camera and trying desperately to keep it stead as laughter rocked her. "I'm sorry, love, but you should see your face!" she exclaimed, her cheeks flushed and eyes shining brightly.

"Where'd this come from?" Lestrade asked dully, feeling like the world's biggest idiot at the moment.

"From the hospital, love, where do you think?" By now, her face was so red that she could have passed for a victim of a summer holiday in California. "That's where I was at when you left that very sweet message for me."

Finally, some neurons sparked in his brain. "Hold on, you're- we're- I mean-" Lestrade's mouth just couldn't seem to wrap itself around the words. His wife set the camera down on the nightstand and wrapped her arms around his neck.

"I think the word you're looking for is 'pregnant,' love," she smiled.

"Oh, God, I love you," Lestrade whispered, pulling her in for a kiss.


End file.
